Martha Rosler scrutinizes the popular fashion magazine Vogue. Rosler is a video, installation and performance artist and teaches at Rutgers University.

The show has a collage based structure, focusing on impressions, personal stories and, most provocatively, looking at Vogue’s place in creating and recreating class power. She also include a quick portrait of Conde Nast, the media mogul who owned Vogue and an array of other “high-style” magazines in the early 20th century.

Rosler begins by confronting the viewer with the bizarre and sexist imagery of the magazine’s fashion ads. It is not difficult to see how media outlets like Vogue spread the idealization of upper class lifestyles, bringing people to a point where they seek validity in emulating such exaggerated portrayals of the wealthy. The magazine is targeted at middle class women, delivering a message of artificial promise and encouraging a lifestyle consumption to the average person, but at a price. By getting people to try to identify with the leisure class, and arranging the anxiety of the unobtainable into a perpetual want, the magazine and others like it are key instruments of social control. Vogue is but one symptom of a consumerism based on bodies, specifically female bodies through a male-dominated gaze, never attempting a portrayal beyond surface or object.

Though there are many ideological and gender-based criticisms of magazines like Vogue, Rosler’s show also reveals how and where the clothing products that make the imagery possible are actually produced: third-world sweatshops. A short segment on working conditions in the clothing industry highlights the warped view of the world this magazine works to instill.